I defrosted my ideas box, and found several morsels which wouldn't make a whole meal in themselves, but nonetheless needed eating.
Palmed off
Here you are: a free chance get to laugh at-not-with me.
I am a Palm Pre owner, pretty much the last one in the box. I hold this status in a work environment of iPeople. I feel my …

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The password for my (now defunct) Thus account was "fat_sweaty_biffer", a fairly strong password according to the xkcd scheme. However, I found out that Thus store passwords in clear text for anyone at their offshored call centre to see when it was read back to me during a support call. Quite funny to hear it said in a slightly bemused way by someone with a strong Mumbai accent though.

ah, so similar.

I had problems with an online account, and called them up to help me fix it. Once we got past the who-are-you-who-am-i part and started trying to figure out my problem, it transpired that the password I entered was accepted by their system...on creation...but not on use. We found this by way of her resetting my password and me logging in and immediately changing it. Once I logged out, I was unable to log back in. When she asked for it to determine if it would work from her location (on the inside of their firewalls) I had to explain to her that I would likely be arrested if I said my password out loud to her. Yes, it was vulgar and obscene (by any reference) and met all of the criteria for a strong password. But there was no way I was going to say it out loud to another person, especially a female, and especially not on a 'recorded for training purposes' support line. I asked her to reset it again and told her this time I'd pick a password that had the same types of characters, but was socially acceptable. After repeating the process, she determined that the problem wasn't with my password, but with my login. Between field-length and character conversion, the login screen id field was different than the password change screen id field.

My only triumph was to have a note added to my account that says "The customer's legal name on this account is not the customer's legal name. The customer's legal name is xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" because their programmers and QA drones probably have names like John Stupid or Ruth Moron, and not Stephen M. Firstpart Secondpartoflong-lastname.

I will say that the lady in the call center was professional, courteous, helpful, and only slightly amused at my problem.

Or swedish. The wife's name was over 30 characters long (not including spaces) before we married and, due to Swedish conventions for naming, she kept her surname as a middle name with mine tacked on the end. Believe it or not, a 40+ character name with accents is not something you can just brush off as an edge case. It's very common.

We've had no end of trouble with idjits who can't comprehend a slightly foreign name. She's been called all sorts of things on paper, from minor misspellings, to using the wrong name as her first name, to the unforgettable Mr Omordlinap in one case... it's fun waiting to see each new permutation.

I have a very short (4 letters) german last name - Fuhr (ok no more jokes, been having the "Heil Hitler" thing since I was at primary school). There are a number of common mistakes made e.g. swapping the r & h round, replacing the "F" with an "S". Then you get people who despite you spelling the name assume they know better and insist it's Fuller, Fewer (not TOO far from how it is pronounced) or possibly worst of all Sewer. But where a few people have managed to get names like Fisher, Fitzgerald/Fitzpatric, Suter or Sully from..........

JUST hoe hard is it to get 4 letters right, spelled out using the phoenetic alphabet?

Prepare for disappointment

"I am confident that Reg readers, who watch the programme solely for the intellectual enjoyment of high sci-fi concepts, will unanimously welcome the removal of this irrelevant, supposedly-titillating distraction."

of slashes..

PHP is actually rather nice in this respect: you can write strings out using single quotes, which does minimal parsing (you're allowed a \' which ends up as a ' ). Alternatively, you can use / as a directory separator in Windows.

Actually, I've got that rather backwards: ideally, in PHP you should only use double-quotes when your strings need variable inclusion ("Hello $foo") or escaped characters ("Hello world\n").

Though when it comes to paths it's probably easier to just use UNIX-like paths and drop them into a realpath() function - though that does return false if the file/directory doesn't exist which can make debugging "interesting".

It's probably good practice to also enclose any variables you want to output in curly braces (just in case) so "Hello $foo\n" might be better written as "Hello {$foo}\n" - it makes sense if you want to output something like "Now you're {$sExpletive}ed\n" ;)

See, that's backwards of how I would do it.

If the idea is to introduce maximum confusion, you want to choose similar sounding words only for similar sounding letters. For example, M and N sound similar, thus you would choose "M for Meade" and "N for Need." Though, to be fair, "N for No" is great.

Other letters include "P for Pee" and "T for Tea," along with "B for Bee" and "G for Gee."

For letters without a like-sounding pair, you always choose words with that letter silent: "H for Hour," "K for Knight," and so on. Using a word that sounds like another word is bonus points: "E for Ewe," "Y for You," "C for Cay," or "A for Aitch."

Upwardly mobile

Slashes

Windows has allowed forward slashes in the file-system *API* for a very long time, at least as long ago as Win95 original, and probably all through the life of WinNT3.x, so for about 20 years. I'm sure there's a pedant somewhere who can tell me whether MS-DOS 2.x supported them back in 1982/3 or so, but I wouldn't be totally surprised to find it did.

ANSI C Standard

Requires that '/' is accepted as a directory separator for all stdlib functions (that deal with filenames). The library must translate them, if need be, into the appropriate character for the underlying OS.

Slases in URLs

I went to a talk by Tim Berners-Lee not long back and someone asked him if he had any second thoughts about the design of HTML etc. He said that he had only one regret: if had to do it again he definitely would have had just one slash after the http: instead of a double one. I think the audience were with him on that.

I said the *API*, not stdlib. CreateFile(...) accepts slashes of either sort, with one exception: if you call CreateFileW with a "pre-parsed" path, i.e. one that begins \\.\ and then continues with a path, that path and the intro sequence must be ready to use exactly as they are, and will, for example, not have /-to-\ slash conversion done on them. They can also be up to 32767 UTF-16 characters long rather than the feeble 260 including NUL that is normally allowed.

Cockerneee Alphabet

@Cazzo Enorme

That sort of password works quite well .... until you have to register somewhere where they start to dictate to you what a secure password is - i.e. you find that that password is rejected because it has to contain some combination of upper case, lower case, numbers, symbols, spaces etc. So you end up adjusting the password you know by adding in a capital letter, changing an i to a 1 etc to meet the requirements. Then next time you try to login you type in your password and it fails, you then remember that you had to do something to get it accepts but what was it and you end you clicking the "forgot password" button.

As for the "security questions" ... I had a site recently where I had to choose 3 out of a fixed set of 7 or 8 possible questions and I struggled to find more than one to which I would be certain of giving the correct answer ... things like "what is you're favourite food" just don't have an single correct answer for me. Had another site once which asked me where I'd gone on my first holiday as a security question and when I submitted the answer got the response that that answer was not acceptable!

Password dictatorship

I totally hate that sort of website... the quality of the protection of my data should be for me to decide not the website programmer.

Frankly most website programmers are far too dictatorial... you 'must' fill in your address - oh yes? Did you check that I didn't just put your company address in for you - oh no, done that again... you 'must' give your name - must I? How do you know its my name not something random (I post on the BBC as anotherfakename).... you 'must' give your age - oh come now you are jesting... you 'must' give us your phone number ... yes, have you tried dialing 0111112121232? Bet you didn't get me... and if you do check too much how about dialing your own office? you 'must' all sorts of things that frankly I don't do, but really p*** me off.

Let me give you the information I know you need to answer my question - mainly just an email addresss.

Not that I speak Welsh but I lived there for a few years and my Dad still does. I think that 'Llandidnor' is perhaps a little closer(*). In other words much as Verity spelt but apply a Welsh accent to mutate the final vowel :)

I for one would welcome the removal of Amy's bandage

"I am confident that Reg readers, who watch the programme solely for the intellectual enjoyment of high sci-fi concepts, will unanimously welcome the removal of this irrelevant, supposedly-titillating distraction."

prudishly painting on a skirt would not be practical as far from being irrelevant, the distraction is integral to the plot